Reporting for Jury Duty

It’s never a good time to receive a jury duty summons. It’s always a good time to be a Canadian and to live in a free country and to have access to schools and healthcare and justice and elections and all the other things we take for granted. The jury duty summons, though, is always an inconvenience and a thing to be “gotten out of”.

I take my civic responsibility seriously. If I were ever tried in court, I would want to know that the jury was composed of upstanding citizens who believed in the need for justice, rather than the people who couldn’t figure out how to get out of serving.

Which is why I’m writing this from a very overheated “Jury Lounge” in the Ontario Court of Justice, waiting for something that may never happen. The day started with an early-morning arrival at the court in downtown Toronto, ducking raindrops on the way over from the subway. We assembled and inched our way through a security line outside the building, sadly accompanied by a distinctly urine-like smell. A quick bag X-ray and metal detector scan later, we were guided into the Jury Lounge.

The wheels of the justice system may grind slowly, but it’s mostly because they’re full of inefficiencies. First stop: the Jury Lounge. But this is not the Jury Lounge you’re looking for, although it’s clearly the only one marked ”<--- Jury Lounge” as you enter the building. To resolve this confusion, there’s a clerk posted at the front of the line to ask if you’ve been summoned to the fifth-floor lounge (I have) and to guide you back out into the hallway and up the elevator. That appears to be their entire role in this affair, which marks the first of many times I’ll encounter my tax dollars hard at work.

The fifth floor is not markedly different than the first floor. My elevator’s worth of would-be jurors find our way to a table awkwardly positioned in a hallway, womanned by three female Court Services Officers (CSOs) in ill-fitting blue blazers. The very friendly one at the head of the A-L line checks me in and repeats the same line she says every day, all day: “Please keep your belongings with you in the lounge. If you’re taking a break, please put your summons on the window ledge so we know you’re out. Washrooms are down the hall on the left.” It’s said in an almost sing-song pacing that distorts the meaning, but probably keeps her as entertained as you can be while parroting the same three sentences, hour after hour. I can’t help but notice that her long-ago-crisp white shirt collar is entirely caked in makeup, the same colour as her skin¹.

The lounge is very hot. I was worried I might be cold, but that is not going to be the case today, or perhaps any day in this Lounge. Mysteriously, many of my fellow summonees sit in their coats and turtlenecks. I’m sweating by the time I sit down. We were summoned for 8:30 am, and the room slowly filled up to about 3/4s by the time a CSO came in to make an announcement at 9:30. Punctuality may be a virtue, but it’s one that Justice is apparently blind to.

The announcement is long and impressively delivered without notes. I suspect that she has given it so many times that she no longer needs them. Perhaps being a CSO is a rewarding career in other ways? We learn that we’re summoned for five days, being one business week, though starting on a Tuesday, so ending the following… Monday? Unclear. This is the busiest court in all of Ontario, possibly in all of Canada. There are 5 - 10 trials a week that may be at the jury selection stage. If none of them are, we’ll all be dismissed and can go home. Otherwise, we’re to come to this infernally hot room every day in the hopes that we might be assigned to a trial in a less fiery chamber. At that point, we’ll receive instructions from the judge and have an opportunity to attest to our fitness to serve on the jury. If our employer isn’t paying us to be here, we’ll receive a stipend of $120/day that we’re on a jury (but not per day of sweltering in the Lounge — that is its own reward).

We then get to watch an animated short film, aptly titled Jury Duty and You, which enthusiastically introduces us to the different people we might meet in the courtroom, the roles they play, how they might be dressed², and the answers to a litany of FAQs, most of which I did not have³. We’re cautioned that the version on the website is out of date and, with a deep sigh, shared with a faint but institutionally beaten-down hope that perhaps it might be updated one day⁴.

We were told the start of the court session, estimated at about 10am, would bring us an update on our fate. I suppose less dramatically than most of the fates being decided in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice today. Still, though, more about me and the discharge of my civic responsibilities. That fateful time sailed by without further notice. At 11:45, the same CSO rocked up to the mic, but this time in a much better mood. Panel dismissed! We weren’t required for any of the trials that needed panels, and had to clear out because other panels were coming in, which made no sense at all, but was met with a languid, half-hearted, heat-exhausted cheer.

It was all rather anticlimactic. In the end, my civic responsibilities involved sitting in a sauna for about three hours in exchange for being prohibited from serving on a jury until 2030. In a Hellerian summary of the day worthy of Catch-22, the CSO left us with two parting thoughts:

You might want to serve on a jury again during that time, but you’re legally prohibited from doing so.
The court has no record of whether you’ve been summoned or not, and so there’s a very good chance that you might get summoned again during the period of prohibition, like this guy, who was there just last week, and who got summoned the day after he was discharged. Seriously, right? Poor guy. So, anyway, they don’t have any records, and so if you get summoned again, you have to keep the previous summons upon which, in official purple marker, the number “2” has been scrawled, as that — THAT — is the only evidence that you have discharged your duties.

And just like that, I was back on University Avenue, feeling proud to be a Canadian who did the absolute minimum I could possibly do to keep our fine country humming along. It felt entirely apt that the end of this process was a crisp summary of the complete inefficiency of everything that had come before it. It would be so easy to just update the database that produced the summons in the first place with an eligibility date and to filter out the people who aren’t eligible. Just like it would be so easy to replace the ”<--- Jury Lounge” sign, despite it being so professionally printed on an 8.5x11, with one that said ”<--- 1st floor Jury Lounge | ^ 5th floor Jury Lounge”. Maybe more people would volunteer to fulfill their civic responsibilities if their expectation was an efficient, air-conditioned experience and less, well, this:

Or, perhaps, her skin is the same colour as the makeup. Are zebras made of white stripes on black or black stripes on white? ↩
Before you get too excited, the only options appear to be either in robes or business attire, depending on the matter at hand. I hope that sometimes the matter at hand is not clearly either a robe or a business situation, and some people show up dressed the wrong way and get funny looks. ↩
This did include a question about how we should dress, which seemed a little late given that we’re all sweating through whatever we wore today already, but also disappointingly did not include an option to wear a robe. ↩
One does wonder, as one in the British Commonwealth is prone to do, if part of the cost of updating this cinematic masterwork was caused by the death of our previously reigning Queen and the need to change everything to “The King,” as in “The King’s Bench,” upon which the judge is seated. ↩

Footnotes